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Privacy has become one of the defining issue of the Information Age. CIS has received national recognition for its interdisciplinary and multi-angle examination of privacy, particularly as it relates to emerging technology.

Aleecia M. McDonald's research focuses on the public policy issues of Internet privacy, and includes user expectations for Do Not Track, behavioral economics and mental models of privacy, and the efficacy of industry self regulation. She co-chaired, and remains active in, the WC3’s Tracking Protection Working Group, an ongoing effort to establish international standards for a Do Not Track mechanism that users can enable to request enhanced privacy online. Read more » about Aleecia McDonald

Jennifer Granick is the Director of Civil Liberties at the Stanford Center for Internet and Society. Jennifer returns to Stanford after working with the internet boutique firm of Zwillgen PLLC. Before that, she was the Civil Liberties Director at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Jennifer practices, speaks and writes about computer crime and security, electronic surveillance, consumer privacy, data protection, copyright, trademark and the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Read more » about Jennifer Granick

Ryan Calo is an assistant professor at the University of Washington School of Law and a former research director at CIS. A nationally recognized expert in law and emerging technology, Ryan's work has appeared in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, NPR, Wired Magazine, and other news outlets. Ryan serves on several advisory committees, including the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the Electronic Privacy Information Center, and the Future of Privacy Forum. Read more » about Ryan Calo

Jonathan Mayer is a Ph.D. candidate in computer science at Stanford University, where he received his J.D. in 2013. He was named one of the Forbes 30 Under 30 in 2014, for his work on technology security and privacy. Jonathan's research and commentary frequently appears in national publications, and he has contributed to federal and state law enforcement actions. Read more » about Jonathan Mayer

Facebook previewed a new notice strategy today. Part of the proposed change is a simpler privacy policy. Meh. I, like many, am a privacy policy skeptic. I'm skeptical of layered notice, too. I'm even skeptical of privacy policy icons, tables, and nutrition-style labels. They all run into the same problem: written text cannot simultaneously be readable and exhaustive, thorough and yet concise.

As an alternative, I argue for a concept I've been calling "visceral" privacy notice. Rather than tell people at length what your privacy practices may be, you show them what they really are. Facebook took a step in this direction today, joining Google and Yahoo! in what I hope to be an emerging best practice.{C} Read more » about Facebook's New Privacy Tools As User Notice

Good news for journalists wanting added protection from surveillance. Yahoo! hasannounced a technical preview of its email security tool End-to-End, which it has been developing in collaboration with Google. This is another milestone in the tech companies' efforts to protect users not just from outsiders, but also from the companies themselves.

In 2013, 29-year-old Ian Barber allegedly posted nude photos of his ex-girlfriend on Twitter and sent them to her employer and sister. New York prosecutors charged him with aggravated harassment, but the charges were soon thrown out. It was not because evidence pointed to someone else as responsible for the disclosure of the woman’s nude photos. Rather it was because Barber did not send the photos directly to the victim, as New York’s aggravated harassment law requires. Read more » about Expand harassment laws to protect victims of online abuse

A couple of months after the conviction of Ross Ulbricht, the “Dread Pirate Roberts” behind the creation of the Silk Road online drug market, another online drug market, “Evolution” has imploded. Like the Silk Road, Evolution used “Tor Hidden Services,” to hide the true location of their Web site, providing the owners, and drug buyers and sellers with some degree of anonymity. But this Web site didn’t go down thanks to the feds. It went down because its owners took it down.

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"Stanford Center for Internet and Society director of civil liberties, Jennifer Granick, told ZDNet that American data could be swept up by the NSA, and many of the decisions on which US-based data goes international is made by service providers themselves. "

"Ryan Calo, assistant professor of law at the University of Washington and a privacy expert, told me that he’s concerned with how facial recognition technology could judge the mental state of exiting passengers. “What I worry about with biometrics is the capacity to tell things like: Is this person nervous? Are they lying? … I worry about too closely studying human subjects at the borders, in or out,” he says."Read more » about Homeland Security Facility Is Testing a Fun New Biometric Program for Airports

""There is no word in any privacy policy that is not there for a reason. If something is missing, then it's missing for a reason," said Brian Pascal, an attorney and privacy researcher at the University of California Hastings College of Law in San Francisco. He added that while there may or may not be a "practical impact" by Facebook's specific policy phrasing, "it's certainly interesting.""Read more » about Facebook's mood study: How you became the guinea pig

"It’s not clear that Facebook Inc.’s attempts to manipulate user emotion are an ethical lapse, says Patrick Lin, an associate professor in the philosophy department at California Polytechnic State University, where he directs the ethics and emerging sciences group.

In case you somehow missed it, a furor has erupted over news that Facebook has conducted a massive experiment on nearly 700,000 unwitting users But is the outrage actually justified? “I don’t really see a lot of ethical issues yet, given the level of detail that is out there,” says Dr. Lin. "Read more » about Facebook Furor Is Overblown, Says CalPoly Ethicist

The Mitchell Lecture, “Who Rules Big Data? Law, Knowledge, and Power,” will explore that question, with special emphasis on how these information technologies are changing our understanding and application of the law. The event - the Law School’s signature lecture series - will be held at 2 p.m. March 27 in Room 106 of John Lord O’Brian Hall. A reception will follow. The event is free and open to the public. Read more » about Mitchell Lecture 2015 - “Who Rules Big Data? Law, Knowledge, and Power”

Speaker: Jennifer Granick, Stanford University NSA stands for National Security Agency, but the agency is at odds with itself in its security mission. Undermining global encryption standards, intercepting Internet companies' data center transmissions, using auto-update to spread malware, and demanding law enforcement back doors in products and services are all business as usual. What legal basis does NSA and FBI have for these demands, and do they make the country more or less safe? Read more » about Modern Surveillance